Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1469 - 1493 of 1886
WASHINGTON (JTA)-One state. Flexibility. Two states. Hold back on settlements. Stop Iran. When President Donald Trump met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What a press conference! But wait. In the Age of Trump, every post-event analysis requires a double take. Not so much "did he mean what he said?"-he appears to mean it, in real time-but "will he mean it next week? Tomorrow? In the wee hours, when he tweets?" This is a president who, after all, speaks of a "ban" on travelers from...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Evangelicals, who have been advocating for Israel for years, have historically let the Jews take the lead. Laurie Cardoza-Moore, for one, is excited that they are poised to take on a prominent role. An evangelical TV host and activist, Cardoza-Moore backs President Donald Trump's pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a supporter of the settlement movement who is deeply skeptical of the two-state solution. And she is confident Trump will make good on his promise to...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Over 100 years ago, Barnett Levine was greeted by the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty as he arrived in the United States, having fled anti-Semitism and pogroms in his native Poland. On Sunday, his grandson saw those very same sights when he joined about 700 others in this city's Battery Park downtown at a rally protesting President Donald Trump's executive order banning all refugees from the country for 120 days. "I am the grandchild of four immigrants who came here...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-House Speaker Paul Ryan said it makes more sense to rigorously enforce the Iran nuclear deal than to dismantle it, signaling diminishing support for pulling the United States out of the deal. Ryan, R-Wis., speaking on "Meet the Press" in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday, said the removal of sanctions under the nuclear rollback for sanctions relief deal reached in 2015 between Iran and six major world powers meant it would be too hard to reconstitute the sanctions....
(JTA)-Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaker in a historic 51-50 vote. DeVos, a Michigan billionaire whose advocacy for school choice has led to sweeping changes in the educational landscape in her home state, provoked divergent opinions in the Jewish community. Both the haredi Orthodox Agudath Israel of America and the Orthodox Union issued congratulations within minutes of the vote. It marked the first time a vice president b...
(JTA)—At least 11 Jewish community centers across the United States were targeted with bomb threats in the third wave of such mass disruption this month. David Posner, director of strategic performance at JCC Association of North America, whose role involves advising local JCCs on security policies and practices, issued the below statement: “Today, a third wave of bomb threats called in to Jewish community centers has caused 14 centers in 10 states plus one Canadian province, to quickly carry out practiced security protocols to ensure the safet...
(JTA)-The White House statement for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that has generated controversy for omitting Jews reportedly was written by a Jewish aide to President Donald Trump. Boris Epshteyn, a special assistant to the president, crafted the statement, the political news website Politico reported Monday evening, citing an unnamed source "with knowledge of the situation." Epshteyn, a former Republican political strategist, immigrated to the United States from his native Moscow in...
NEW YORK (JTA)—A person calls a Jewish institution, makes a bomb threat and hangs up. The call lasts no more than a minute, the caller’s voice is disguised and the call is made to look as if it came from inside the building. How do you catch the culprit? That’s the question the FBI is facing in investigating the 65 bomb threats that have hit JCCs and Jewish federations in three waves throughout January. The latest string of threats, targeting 17 JCCs across the country, occurred Tuesday. The first waves across the country came on Jan. 9 and 1...
WASHINGTON, DC—U.S Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, made the following statement after introducing H.R. 762, the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act of 2017, alongside Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and John Garamendi (D-CA). Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced a companion bill in the Senate. Statement by Ros-Lehtinen: “Just days ago, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world commemorated the millions of Jews and other innocent victims who were sys...
(JTA)—A year after they submitted their application for asylum in the United States, Shahi and his mother expected to be let in. As Iranian Jews who applied for asylum through a federally recognized agency for refugee status, their case was expected to be simple. Shahi (not his real name) is in his late 20s and already has two sisters waiting for him and their mother. As of now, mother and son are in a third transit country. But the lives of Shahi’s family were plunged into further uncertainty on Friday when President Donald Trump signed an...
(JTA)—American Jews are watching the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency with both fear and hope. Many have expressed worries about some of his supporters’ ties to the so-called “alt-right” movement, whose followers traffic variously in white nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, anti-Semitism and a disdain for “political correctness.” Those fears intensified when Trump named as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, a site Bannon once referred to as a “platform” of the alt-right. Trump’s strongly cons...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-"Cantor Kaufman!" Rabbi Jonah Pesner shouted across the intersection of 3rd and D in Washington's Northwest quadrant, packed sidewalk to sidewalk with women in pink pussycat hats and their male friends. "A song!" Jason Kaufman, the cantor at Beth El in Alexandria, Virginia, draped in a rainbow tallit and in the middle of telling a joke, cocked an eyebrow and pivoted gracefully from the guy hanging with his buddies at Saturday's Women's March on Washington to the religious...
(JTA)-One Jewish group that joined the Women's March on Washington has seen its online donations double since the election of Donald Trump as president. Another has twice as many guests as usual attending its annual conference. A third has seen its social media engagement skyrocket. And after bringing thousands of Jews to the streets on Saturday, they're all asking the same question: What now? A range of liberal Jewish groups took part in the Women's March, which drew more than 3 million people...
Supporters of National Council of Jewish Women and other Jewish organizations come together on the National Mall for the Women's March on Washington, January 21, 2017. Please check out another article for more on the Women's March....
(JTA)—President Donald Trump can appoint his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner as a White House senior adviser, the Justice Department concluded. In a 14-page opinion issued Friday, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that a federal anti-nepotism law passed in 1967 “does not bar this appointment because of the President’s special hiring authority.” The opinion, written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Daniel Koffsky, is based on a 1978 law that allows the president to appoint White House officials, overriding the nepotism law. The...
Being an Orthodox Jew can cost a pretty penny. There are the premium prices for kosher meat, the two sets of dishes, the mikvah fees. There are expensive lifecycle celebrations like brises and bar mitzvahs, and requisite accessories like tefillin ($1,000). The Jewish holidays have expenses all their own: sukkahs, shmura matzah, big holiday meals with lots of guests-to say nothing of the cost of using up vacation days for the Jewish holy days. Then there are the big-ticket items, like real...
(JTA)-Super Bowl LI (51) will feature teams with Jewish owners for the first time since 2012. Robert Kraft will see his New England Patriots, the American Football Conference champions, in the big game for the seventh time since 2000. He bought the club, which will be making its record ninth Super Bowl appearance, in 1994. Arthur Blank will watch his National Football Conference-winning Atlanta Falcons playing in their second Super Bowl-but the first since the Home Depot founder bought the team...
NEW YORK—A wave of bomb threats Wednesday morning caused 27 Jewish community centers in 17 states to quickly engage in security protocols to ensure the safety of their participants and facilities. Many quickly received the all-clear from local law enforcement, with whom they are working closely, and have resumed regular operations. This is the second time this month that multiple JCCs have received bomb threats in a single day. Paul Goldenberg, the director of Secure Community Networks (SCN), said there were bomb threats called in to Jewish c...
(JTA)—Reacting to the inaugural address of President Donald Trump, Jewish groups stuck to their ideological bearings. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations praised the unifying portions of Trump’s speech and called on him to safeguard Israel’s security and other Jewish interests. “We welcome President Trump’s acknowledgement of the need to heal the divisions in our country, to improve the lives of all Americans, to reinforce alliances and to strengthen our security,” the statement said. “We look forward to wo...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-Barack Obama got his kishkes back. The president, whose alleged aloofness was the signature flaw cited by his rivals, his critics and at times his friends, ended his presidency with an impassioned appeal for the preservation of democracy-his lower lip trembling, a tear streaking his cheek. For sure, Obama could be emotional, heimishe even-remember his tears while speaking with the parents of the children slain in Newtown, Connecticut, or his singing of "Amazing Grace" during...
(JTA)-A bomb threat is never an inconsequential thing. But 16 in one day is inconceivable-at least it was until Monday, Jan. 9. That's when 16 Jewish community centers in nine states received calls threatening a bomb on site. While the bombs turned out to be hoaxes, the calls themselves were not. They were designed to create a kind of disruptive terror in places that serve as visible community hubs of activity. The JCCs affected stretched from Florida to New Jersey, where the temperature was 11...
NEW YORK (JTA)—The FBI and Department of Homeland Security will be assisting local Jewish community centers in bolstering security after 16 JCCs received bomb threats on the same day. On Wednesday, officials from the FBI and Homeland Security will conduct a conference call with U.S. Jewish communal leaders to discuss Monday’s incidents, what they stem from and how to craft protocols to handle such incidents in the future. Some communities already receive federal grants to provide for security. The bomb threats, none of which appear cre...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-Reps. Ed Royce and Eliot Engel are that Capitol Hill rarity: a Republican and a Democrat who truly have each other's back. And nothing unites Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and Engel, D-N.Y., its top Democrat, like support for Israel. Not simply Israel-Royce and Engel take their cues on the issue from the mainstream pro-Israel community, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Right now, that means...
(JTA)—Jewish organizations split along ideological lines in their reactions to Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech criticizing Israeli settlement growth and laying out principles to achieve a two-state solution. Centrist groups were measured in their reactions, criticizing the American decision to abstain last week on a U.N. vote rebuking the settlements while praising Kerry’s commitment to a two-state solution. American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris wrote in an open letter Dec. 28 that he watched the speech “as one who underst...
(JTA)-NORPAC, one of the largest pro-Israel political action committees, praised President-elect Donald Trump's pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel for his "lifetime of pro-Israel advocacy." Congratulating David Friedman on his appointment, NORPAC in a statement called him "an accomplished attorney" with "extensive knowledge of Israel and the Middle East." "His lifetime of pro-Israel advocacy has earned him the trust and respect of the Israeli People, a point which will enable him to best...
